RPG review – NPC Arsenal No. 3: Mercenary Pikeman

NPC Arsenal No. 3: Mercenary Pikeman, from the new series by Abandoned Arts, offers you one NPC-build, a complex one – 3 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, 1 page character, so what do we get here?

This time around, we get a human polearm master fighter 9 at CR 8 – finally some love for the poor, underutilized polearms! The mercenary fights with a glaive-guisarme and when pictured, should remind you of how fighting against Kilik (or any other long-range character) can annoy the hell out of you in Soul Calibur: With improved readied actions and pushing assault as well as vital strike, running against the readied actions of this guy will prove painful indeed. The extensive notes on further levelling the build and tactics of this NPC add more value, showing (gleefully so), how utterly evil this build can be in melee, with potions helping against some of the character’s weaknesses.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to a landscape two-column standard and the pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

A more than solid build centred on just being a polearm master, AoOs and readied actions, this build may not be the most complex one, but it is a fun build; One that should definitely make some PCs gnash their teeth. Now it’s not a particularly complex build, but it’s versatile and mobile enough to make for a fun NPC – taking the low price into account, I’ll settle for a final verdict of 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5: A very good, if not exceptional build.

Endzeitgeist out.

NPC Arsenal No. 3: Mercenary Pikeman is available from:

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